


For My Next Trick

by Nutkin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Consensual Underage Sex, Established Relationship, M/M, Pre-Series, Sam is 17, Sibling Incest, Teen Dean Winchester, Teen Sam, Teen Sam Winchester, Teenagers, Weecest, Wincest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-02
Updated: 2012-11-02
Packaged: 2017-11-17 15:04:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/552875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nutkin/pseuds/Nutkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam decides to go to college, but there's a lot he's leaving behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For My Next Trick

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks (as always) to Valiant for the beta and encouragement!

When they pull up in front of Caleb's house, Indian summer is still thick in the air. It's late September, a school year already started, and the foliage around the house is still lush and green. Only one tree has started to change, darkening a little around the edges, and it gives the impression of a lettuce leaf just beginning to wilt.

It's Sam's senior year, and he's been promised a term here - Caleb gone up north, all the way to Canada, his house rent-free to them if they keep it in smooth working order.

Sam has only just developed the funny little tic of shaking his bangs out of his eyes; it's been months since he's had a proper haircut at a real barber's, and Dean hacking at his hair with scissors in a motel bathroom is a painful experience for everyone involved.

"We get to claim our rooms, or what?" Dean says, shouldering his duffel bag.

Their dad pushes down the lock on the driver's side door and it slams shut. "Sam can have Molly's, you can have the spare."

Dean smirks over at him, raising his eyebrows and making his sunglasses slide off his forehead and down onto the bridge of his nose. "Enjoy the unicorn collection, there, Sammy."

Sam shakes his bangs back again and looks at the front of the house, empty fields opening up behind it. As long as he can remember, this is what he's been asking for; four bedrooms and a well-stocked kitchen, two stories, a lawn. Caleb doesn't have a dog, but he's sure that out in the back yard there are plenty of unmarked pet graves, all part and parcel of having a permanent address. A life that's actually yours.

"Can we go register at the school tomorrow?" he asks, shutting the back door with a quiet click.

"First things first."

*

Sam actually kind of likes his room. It's got a lived in feeling to it, comfortable and nice. It feels like he's slipping into someone else's life when he wakes up in the white wicker bed - like the row of Ramona Quimby books on the shelf could be leftovers from his childhood, or the framed glass boxes of moths on the walls are mementos from a bug-collecting obsession when he was fourteen. He doesn't really know anything about Molly other than the fact she's married now, but when he thumbs through her copy of _Fear and Trembling_ and finds all the passages she underlined or circled, he thinks he might love her a little bit.

Dean settles into the guest room with a shrug and a bag flung at the little love seat. It's not the first time he's existed within four anonymous walls, and it doesn't seem to faze him. The only alteration to the decor he makes is pulling the portrait of a milkmaid off the wall. "Gives me the fuckin' creeps," is all he had to say about it.

The silence seems deafening at first. It's hard to deal with the steady quiet of four solid walls around them instead of cardboard-thin divisions in motels and apartment complexes, barely muffling the noises of other people's televisions and arguments and sex. There's not even the rumble of the car, or the clatter of some tape in the stereo. Just silence, steady and foreboding. They don't talk about it, but they spend the first couple of nights walking around on eggshells, staying up too late at the kitchen table with rock salt in front of them, just waiting for something to happen.

It never does.

He likes what they become in these hollowed-out moments, little places where they can catch their breath and start to close the gaps between their family and everyone else's. They fall into routines by accident more than design. 

"Do anything for two weeks," their father sometimes says, "and it becomes a habit."

Dean wakes him up with slaps on his cheeks in the mornings, and they go running as the sun comes up - three miles, sometimes five, in the watery-blue light of early dawn. 

He doesn't need to look up to recognize the neighborhood. He's been here before, in other places, other states. The houses are all broad and neat, cushioned from the road by a stretch of brittle grass and a sloped driveway. There are flowers by some, little gardens that have been lovingly mulched, and he knows that out back there are little vegetable gardens where people grow their own tomatoes and squash. He hasn't lived in this neighborhood before, but he's hunted in a hundred of them, and they're all the same. 

In this one the houses border farm land - it was the middle of nowhere when Caleb bought his - and Sam's sneakers and Dean's boots pound out a steady rhythm on the blacktop as they disappear into fields. 

Sometimes Dean picks up one of the old military jodies their dad used to bark at them when they did this as a family. He only remembers the dirty ones, busted out for those last stretches of mile when they were both bone-weary and exhausted, and that's what he breathes tunelessly into the early morning air; always crass, always obscene, and Sam laughs, "I'm not repeating that," around steam-white breaths. When he shoves Dean's arm, Dean shoves him back, and they scrabble for a quarter of a mile, trying to trip each other down onto the pavement.

Eventually they hit a place where the houses are all behind them, until they can't even see the yellow glow of porch lights, and that's where Dean veers off into open fields. Sam follows, chasing after him, and inevitably gets clotheslined, wrestled to the cold ground. It's not really a struggle - nah, he could take Dean - but they're both too brimming with adrenaline for anything to be easy.

"Cheater," he complains, heart still pounding, chest heaving. Dean works his hand under the soft cotton of Sam's hoodie, and his fingers feel cool against the impossible heat trapped there.

"You just got bad reflexes, Private."

"Yeah, that's gotta be it."

Dean palms him through his pants, and they rock against each other, senses so sharp that it's all half-instinct. Pushing, pulling, rubbing, Dean huffing out swears against the corner of Sam's mouth. The stalks around them are heavy with dew, and the dirt feels tightly-packed and damp under him, but Sam feels more alive than ever, heat radiating off of him - off of both of them - sticky-wet and sweet. 

Later, after showers and breakfast, the school bus passes Dean jogging on his own up the highway. He's wearing Sam's hoodie now, the too-long sleeves pushed up to his elbows, and Sam swivels around in his seat just like the girls, watching him move, watching him run. He gives the back of the bus a little salute as they pass, and Sam can see the eight o'clock sun reflect on his teeth.

*

He doesn't think much about graduation. 

"Class of '01!" is what everyone says, like it's some common thread that holds them together. They're all counting down days and minutes - have been counting down years - and he feels awkward for not noticing or caring.

School is a steady rhythm for him, an assembly line of essays and worksheets. He's used to meeting expectations, following directions, and it's just another shade of the same. He keeps his head down and nose clean, doesn't worry about it. His performance at Gillespie High is the same as it was everywhere else, and he's honestly surprised when his English teacher asks him what colleges he's applying to.

"I'm not," he says, and Mr. Danielson raises his eyebrows, the motion intentional. He's clearly waiting for something more, and looks concerned when it doesn't come.

"Sam," he starts, and the bell rings in a distant part of the school.

"Sorry." Sam lifts his shoulder sheepishly and picks up his books. "Biology."

He gets handed a slip the next day in AP History, the box next to "guidance counselor" checked through with a wide X. He knows what his father would say about this: should have had a lie ready.

The fact of the matter is, he's never really thought about life past high school. He's dreamed about it, maybe, in the halting, hopeful way he's dreamed about escape, about writing books and making friends, but those aren't the kind of thoughts he ever blows the dust off of and looks at in the harshness of daylight. Dean would hurt himself laughing, for one, and they'd lose their sweetness if he dwelled on them too long.

The guidance counselor takes her glasses off and looks at him evenly, his transcript open on her desk. From where he's sitting, he can see the scribble of ballpoint that makes up four years, fifteen schools, and countless dozens of teachers. 

She isn't unattractive, in that over-forty way. He can imagine her leaving this perfume-scented office at the end of the day, climbing into her nice SUV, and driving home to a place with family and home-cooked dinners. He can almost see the smiling faces, the sense of being content, of being safe and comfortable. And maybe that's why when she says, "It's never too late to pull the fat out of the fire, Sam," he believes her.

*

The garage Dean works at belongs to a friend of Caleb's - or maybe a friend of a friend, Sam can't remember. He's come to understand that every hunter has a loose web of acquaintances who can help in a jam, people who have had unfortunate poltergeist problems, or whose cousin is really glad his pond doesn't have kelpies anymore. It's part of the job - people are grateful, and if you don't ask too many questions, neither will they.

"Easy money," he grins, teeth white against the streaks of grease on his cheeks. The friend of the friend knows as much as he needs to, and it's part of their arrangement that Dean sets his own hours. The idea is that he can up and leave for a hunt if he needs to, but it winds up working out that he shows up at odd times, working long, grueling Sundays or cool, lonely nights. 

*

There are only two people in his English class who have already read _Slaughterhouse Five_ , and he's one of them. Mrs. Whitehead says there's no sense in participating in class discussion when they already know the end, so he and Dana are assigned to a new book and to each other.

"Thank god," she says. "I hate Vonnegut."

Dana is by turns pretty and plain. She grew up in Gillespie her whole life, and she has that casual attitude about it that can only come from being born and bred in a single place. She knows the story of the founding of the town (she had played the founder's wife in a sixth grade play), and tells him about the crazy lady who lived up the street and shot herself out on the sidewalk.

"My mom says you could see the blood stain on the pavement for years," she says, tugging on the end of her ponytail. "But they paved over it in the eighties."

He's envious of it, the little facets of normal he sees everywhere in her life. The doorway in her kitchen has little lines drawn on it, checking off height throughout the years. She and her sister, little pairs all the way up: _Dana 6, Lucille 8; Dana 8, Lucille 10; Dana 12, Lucille 14_. Near his own line of sight someone had facetiously scribbled, _Dana 96, Lucille 98,_ the angle of the handwriting suggesting that it was written by someone very short.

She gives him a Coke, which she calls pop, and asks him if he believes in God. He thinks about Pastor Jim and Sunday services when he was a kid, and tells her yes. She says she'll take him to church with her, promises he'll like it.

He can't think of any reason to say no, so he agrees.

It's not terribly new. He's dated artsy girls in five different zip codes, because those are always the ones who talk to him. They can forgive the gaps in his personality, the things that don't quite add up. Maybe they find him romantic, someone who has lived in so many places, someone who has no embarrassing baby pictures. Someone as quiet and mysterious as a character in a book, who doesn't invite them over but calls their fathers sir. 

He's learned interesting things that way, like how they all love TS Eliot, all listen to the same music, and really just want someone to listen to them air out their ideas and opinions. It always ends in awkward kissing, hands that are too used to touching Dean fumbling over breasts and sensitive girl skin. He wants it like he doesn't even know how to say, but it's confusing, always out of his grasp. 

He's never been able to connect with someone as simply and easily as he can with Dean, and it scares the hell out of him.

*

Dean shot through puberty, filling out with each inch he gained. If there was any awkwardness to him, Sam sure can't remember it; everything has always come easily for him, and growing up wasn't any different. Sam feels like he's still trying to outrun childhood, painfully aware of his own skinniness, the way he's just skin and bones and nerves. It's gotten a little better lately - maybe - but there's a childish curve to his face that he hates, a lankiness to his limbs that's as much a hunting liability as it is a wound to his vanity.

He watches Dean sometimes and wonders where he gets it, that easy grace and smooth, thick muscle. Even when they're both stripped down to nothing, and he's digging his fingers into his arms, into his legs, he feels like he doesn't understand it. 

The kitchen is Dean's domain, which is why he gets away with stuff like drinking milk right out of the carton. Sam watches him, the way his throat works as he swallows, and shakes his head. 

"You're so gross," he says fondly, leaning against the refrigerator door from the other side and nabbing the carton out of his hand. He takes a swig, too, grinning around the opening. 

"Nice mustache," Dean says, folding the spigot shut and setting it back on the empty shelf. "Real distinguished."

Sam wipes his mouth off with the back of his hand and presses Dean back up against the shut door, the mottled white plastic cool under his fingers as their mouths fit together. It's a nice one, the kind with an ice machine right in the front, and he grips the edge of it as he leans in.

Dean hooks his fingers through the belt loops of his jeans, tugging his hips up closely. He tilts his chin up a little to look at him. "You gonna quit growin' any time soon?"

"Thinkin' about it," he answers. "Maybe."

He doesn't, though. He thought he might be done when he hit 6'2, but that fall alone he gains another inch. He runs harder, eats more. Dean cooks for him sometimes, because he's the only one who has ever bothered with that kind of thing. He throws together weird casseroles, noodles and cut up hot dogs and cheese, and Sam swears he's just hoping to stumble across a combination that's too gross to eat.

"Yeah, well, you could always learn to friggin' cook for yourself," Dean says, dumping ketchup over his plate.

On one of the last nice days of the year he wheels the lawn mower out of the shed and mows the expansive yard, and the old lady across the street waves at him. He mows hers, too, and she feeds him lemonade and pastries in payment. 

"Mrs. Collins," is how she introduces herself, and she smells like powder no one uses anymore. He can imagine her sitting somewhere upstairs with one of those theatrical puffs, patting it on her thin skin like it was sophisticated to do when she was his age. He likes her immediately, even though she looks at him with sharp eyes and asks him the same questions as everyone - where do you want to go to school? What do you want to study?

"Architecture," he says, just for the hell of it. She nods approvingly and gives him another scone, and he likes that he passed some secret test.

*

Dean doesn't seem that curious when Sam comes home from the library with eight books on SAT preparation. He dropped out early in his junior year, as soon as he turned sixteen, and Sam can tell by the way he wrinkles his nose and thumbs through _SAT Verbal: What to Expect_ that he doesn't really get what it entails.

"This somethin' they're makin' you do?" he demands. Sam watches his gaze skim, watches him mouth out some word he's taking in.

He cracks open another one of the books and shoves his feet in Dean's lap. "It's not compulsory, it's just - I dunno, it's good to do. My friend Dana's doing it, so I thought I'd give it a try."

"Anything to show off those freaky genius brains, huh?"

Sam digs his toes into the softness of Dean's stomach, and smirks when he makes an _oof_ noise.

It becomes a thing. For two weeks, he spends the window of time between school and dinner planted on the sofa, thumbing through hastily-made flashcards. Dean joins him most of the time, sipping on a beer and making encouraging noises when Sam rubs his forehead and wants to give up altogether.

"C'mon, it's not that hard," he says, dropping his sweating bottle on the coffee table. He snatches the cards out of Sam's hands and studies the top one, eyebrows knitted together.

"Yeah," Sam says dryly. "You make it look so easy."

"Ver - verisimilitude," Dean says, and bites his knee. 

Sam throws his head back and laughs, kicking at him. "Ow! The, uh, the quality of being probable. Jeez."

"Score one for Sammy," Dean says, flipping it over and studying the back. "Now just remember that every time you look at your knees."

"You're an ass," he says, tugging his cards back.

"You love me," Dean says serenely.

Sam huffs and pulls his textbook up until he can't see Dean anymore. "That's verisimilar."

*

When Sam was a kid, Halloween was always spent on the road. Dean told him, over and over, that shivering in a foggy cemetery was way cooler and more spooky than ringing doorbells in some lame Target Spider-Man costume.

"You want candy?" he'd said, more than one year. "I'll steal you some from the next gas station."

Nothing's really changed except Dean's line, which eventually became, "They want candy? They can steal some from a gas station."

This time they're still in Gillespie, and he walks downtown, brittle leaves crunching under his sneakers. The air smells like smoke and apples, even here; the storefronts are a festive tangle of black and orange crepe paper, cobwebbing strung over cardboard headstones. _Here lies Roger Blake, stepped on the gas instead of the brake._

Under one arm he's got his stack of applications, thick in their envelopes. He understands, even at seventeen, that there are moments in life where paths diverge. He's read about these things in books more times than he can count, but truly, he never thought they would be his. That he would have to be faced with a choice, a decision, something he couldn't defer to someone else for. It feels momentous; it feels terrifying.

He walks up and down the main street in town, where the banks are, where the tiny privately-owned clothing stores sit there austerely. Waiting, more than anything, for the skies to open up and someone to tell him what to do.

"Pray," Dana would say earnestly, and that's what he tries, standing there with his handful of neatly folded essays ("The person who has influenced me most in my life is my brother Dean--") and transcripts. He thinks, what should I do? Tell me what to do.

Outside a cafe, a homeless man holds out a cup. He empties his wallet into it - two tens, a five, some singles.

"You're the one, sir," the man says loudly. His voice follows Sam all the way up the street, all the way to the mail box. "God bless this man! The Christian spirit is alive!"

Dean is sitting at the wooden table when he comes home, newspapers spread out over the polished walnut surface and car parts spread over it.

"The fucking car died," he says, not looking up. "Can you believe it? Driven her everywhere in the fucking country, and she has to die on me in Jerk-Off, South Dakota."

"Better than the alternative," Sam says, but he's not really paying attention. He's looking at the lines of Dean's neck, the blur of grease on his cheekbone, the way the engine in front of him has his complete concentration. He thinks for a moment that maybe he has his sign, that maybe this is the answer he was looking for. Maybe they as a family are too big for what that car represents to them. Maybe they have outgrown it.

In the morning there's a note on the table that says, _Hunt in Tennessee, took the truck, back in two days. Don't move the engine if you want to keep both arms._

*

He's looking for a weed whacker in the garage when he finds a bicycle, forgotten behind boxes and draped with a sheet. It looks old, beat-up, and there's a tag hanging from the handlebars with a hasty "$10-" scrawled on it. He's not sure if it was purchased at a yard sale or if it's a hold-over from one held there years ago. It's obviously been sitting there for ages, but the tires have decent pressure and the paint's mostly unchipped, so he claims it as his own. 

The three of them have been using one car for weeks, and the freedom goes to his head.

The place he's pictured isn't what he finds at Clarkson's Auto Repair. For months now, Dean's come home smelling of auto parts, hands scrubbed pink by Lava soap and nails shadowed with resistant grease. Sam's breathed in the gritty smell of cars and gasoline and pictured him here, some place frozen in time - where James Dean might work, if he'd fixed cars instead of racing them. Glass bottles of Coke in a red machine, curved chrome vehicles propped up on blocks, a bunch of jocular mechanics in jumpsuits, shooting the shit and talking about fuel injectors and spark plugs.

Instead it's empty, quiet except for the steady clink of tools on machinery. A Fiat, a Volvo, and a Mercedes are all jacked up, mid-repair. A cracked sign on the wall advises him to not put off the next oil change. Somewhere in the island of an office, a tinny boombox tapers off a commercial and picks up "Suspicious Minds".

Dean rolls out from under a Jeep, "We're closed," blurring into, "What're you doing here?"

"Wanted to see the magic happen," Sam says. His bike is leaning against the wall outside, by the door propped open with a can of cigarette butts. For all intents and purposes, he's simply appeared there. "Anyone else around?"

Dean grins easily, like he knows why he's there. "Just me an' Elvis," he says, wiping his forehead on the sleeve of his uniform. Sam leans back against the side of the car, and Dean's fingers slide up under his shirt, leaving black smudges on the underside of the cotton.

"Are there," he starts, the door handle digging into the small of his back, "uh, cameras, or anything?"

"Jesus," Dean says, laughing against the side of his neck, "quit bein' so paranoid."

Sam's already half-hard in his jeans, the smell of engine oil and sweat hitting him like a physical thing. It's been a few days since they've had the house to themselves, and he arches for it when Dean's hand slides down to the button of his fly, popping it open and shoving in easily.

"Okay," he says, bringing his hands up to either side of Dean's face, covering the smudges of black there. He tastes like the stale sugar of Juicy Fruit, lips chapped and hot and full.

Somehow they wind up on the cold cement floor, and Sam gets his hand right down in Dean's jeans, too, shuddering against him tightly.

"Fuck," he mutters. "Fucking - Christ, that's - yeah."

"Kids say the darndest things," Dean breathes, squeezing him.

He comes with his feet propped against the frame of the car, grease seeping through his t-shirt and the radio still thrumming somewhere in the shop.

*

It's early December when it finally happens. Sam's cramming for a bio test in his bedroom, and there's an inhuman grinding noise from the side yard, followed by the fine, low rumble of the engine.

He folds his arms on the windowsill and leans out, blinking in the watery gray sunlight. The door of the Impala is flung open, and Dean's sitting there behind the wheel, grinning up at him.

"Listen to that baby purr, Sammy. You ever hear a sweeter sound?"

"Stop," he says dryly. "You're turning me on."

Across the road, Mrs. Collins opens the door to see what the racket is. Dean doesn't seem to notice either of them; he just floors the gas again and turns his face up to the sky, listening to his monster come to life.

*

They pull out of Gillespie on a Thursday, one week before the students of GHS are released for Christmas vacation. Sam cleans out his locker carelessly, dumping crumpled bits of paper and chewed-up pens into a cardboard box that finds its way to the trash before he even leaves the premises; he cleans out his bedroom methodically, slowly, tempted to tuck some bits of it into his duffel bag to remember Molly's carefully organized life. He doesn't; that's not the kind of person he is. He just runs his fingers over the spines of her books, admires the line of spelling bee trophies, and climbs into the passenger seat of the car.

When he was a kid, there was this air of temporary to everything they did. It was like they were all waiting for the end to come in sight. Maybe next year, they'd have found the thing - maybe next year they could buy a little house, get back in school regular. Maybe next year the mission would be over with, Mom would be vindicated, and everything could go back to normal.

Now they don't even pretend; Dad plants a pile of documents down on a flimsy motel room table, explaining that the Lee Nelson estate is haunted once a year, and a grizzly death is guaranteed for anyone to spends the night. There's not even the pretense of it being something more, of having a connection to what they're actually looking for, what they beat the pavement in search of every day.

Dean perks up when they're on the road, like the places between power lines are the places he feels the most at home. He doesn't even dose himself with No-Doz like their dad does; he just powers through, endless hours parked behind the steering wheel.

They stop for makeshift breakfasts at convenience stores - donuts and orange juice from a can. Soon they will have weaned themselves completely from the normalcy of a morning with newspapers and beverages that wake you up, ease you into your day. Soon they will drink Mountain Dew - Surge, where Dean can find it - and chew on potato chips, M&Ms, laugh at how they don't have to eat cereal and bagels like everyone else. For now they're close enough to the memories of Caleb's sun-dappled kitchen that it's not much of a stretch, and Sam gets a single-serving carton of milk.

*

Christmas is a bottle of brandy bought with a fake credit card somewhere in Iowa, split three ways in front of a rattling old motel heater. Snow settles on the trees outside, and Dean flexes his fingers around the bottle, watching the car from the icy-cold window.

Sam thinks about Dana and the guidance counselor and everyone he's ever cared about, ever known outside of the sticky confines of his family. He wonders what they're doing today, who they're spending it cocooned with.

"To us," Dean says later, raising his glass, grip a little wobbly. "The Winchesters live to see another year."

Dad automatically clinks in, but it takes Sam a second to - so long that Dean's eyes flicker over to him curiously.

"To us," he says, covering for his pause, but he doesn't really mean it. They might all be better off dead.

*

The winter rolls by in a steady stream of wet pavement and foggy cemeteries.

The rhythm of the road is easier than being stationary; it's an old ache, one that Sam has come to know. Sometimes their dad will get his own room, let them spread out in queen beds of their own, and on those nights he almost feels like an adult. It's more or less been the two of them almost as long as it's been the three of them, Dad always skipping out for hunts and leaving them alone. He watches Dean brush his teeth at night, studies the casual slump of his spine, the way his hip presses against the bathroom counter, and wonders how much of this he will one day forget.

They make do with stolen moments, like they've been doing for years - knees pressed together under diner tables, kisses in front of the bathroom mirror as they shave in the mornings. Dean rubs his knuckles against Sam's stomach in the mornings, when he's hazily waking up and it's early enough for it to seem accidental.

They live their lives under the shadow of, _can't let Dad find out_. It's in the way they talk to each other, the way they look at each other, the way they bicker. Most of the time they sleep in the same bed, tucked around each other chastely.

It's only a problem sometimes, when they let it be. He'll brush his fingers against the side of Dean's forearm and feel his breath hitch, their backs warm and solid and pressed together. One or the other of them will shift a little, send their legs skimming together, and eventually Dean will sigh in a way that lets Sam know he's just as hard as he is, lazy-warm and tempting.

Sometimes, as if on cue, there's the sharp squeal of springs in the other bed as their dad rolls over to face the wall. He knows they can't wake him up from that, that they aren't making any more noise than if they were actually trying to sleep, but it feels like the punishment that doesn't come, feels like getting yelled at, rebuked. Dean goes abruptly still in those moments, and for seconds that drag on and on, all Sam can hear is his own heartbeat and Dean's even, ragged breaths. 

*

In East Bethel, Minnesota, snow cakes on the ground like powdered sugar. It falls gently, slowly, like it's not entirely sure it wants to interrupt the frozen silence of the landscape.

In the car, Sam is clutching the ripped front of Dean's t-shirt, blood pouring out over his hands as he tries to hold the wound shut. 

He knows his brother won't die with the naivety of a child who knows summer is coming. There might be truth to Dean's mortality, but it's nothing that Sam can understand, even now. Dean is too cold, too soaked in blood to take up the reassuring patter, so Sam does it for him - breathing out the words he's been hearing since he was old enough to know the exchange of fear and comfort.

"You're fine, it's fine. Everything's fine. I got you, man, I got you."

"Fuck," Dean gasps. A faint silvery scar runs down his forehead from a run-in with a poltergeist, and it makes a funny little hiccough in his right eyebrow, right at the inner edge. Sam kisses him there, aware he's being watched in the rearview mirror.

"Can't you drive any faster?" he finally says, voice quiet and abrupt.

"Getting in a crash on black ice isn't going to get us there any faster, Sam."

He doesn't answer. The adrenaline in his veins runs like ice water; the buckle of the forgotten seat-belt digs into his knee, cold and metal and harsh. The shuddering, raw jerks of Dean's chest under his hands makes his vision swim, and he all he can think is, _Please, not this. Not fucking this._ He isn't entirely sure who he's asking.

Dean gets thirty-two stitches like railroad tracks across his side, and their dad leaves him in a Motel 6 with two credit cards and a sparsely stocked mini-fridge.

"I don't want to," Sam says flatly, when he's told he's coming. "I should just stay here. He's not in any shape to go shopping or anything."

"I'm not walking into this thing short-handed just because Dean had some bad luck out there. Now give your brother the remote and get your things."

Sam stares out the window most of the way. He can only remember a handful of times he ever did anything with his father without Dean there, and it feels awkward, heavy, strange. There's always been this unspoken bond between dad and Dean, this relationship that dates back to those days when Sam was too little - or wasn't there at all. He frowns at his reflection when he thinks about that, irritation and pointless anger welling in his chest.

"Where are we going?" he finally asks, reaching in the McDonald's bag between them and pulling out a cold french fry.

"Idaho."

"What is it?"

"Don't know yet."

Sam rolls his eyes, brushing his hands together and sending salt sprinkling down on his knees. "But you have some idea, right? We're not just driving across the country without any idea of what we're facing?"

"Sammy," he says warningly. The light of oncoming cars reflects off his wedding ring. "When you need to know, you'll know."

He scowls. "Can we listen to the radio, at least?"

"You should get some sleep."

 _Why do you hate me_ , he wants to ask. 

"Yes, sir," he says, tone clipped, and rests his head on his bunched-up hoodie, thinking about Dean until the thrum of the truck finally sends him under.

*

Dean lost his virginity to a girl in Tennessee whose grandfather was haunting her family. He was fifteen then, and told Sam that night with wide, amazed eyes. 

Sam can still remember how he sounded - so proud, so fearful, so awestruck. It was right around then that he started running to catch up with Dean; trying to touch the things he was getting left behind for. He's been doing it ever since.

He doesn't have regrets about most of the things in his life that he knows he shouldn't have done. Shrugging off physical training for more time the library, or getting noticed in school occasionally, having teachers call him a "bright pupil," that sort of thing. The only time he really gets a twinge of it is when the three of them are crammed in an IHOP booth, and sitting near families with children who color on each other's placemats and fling hashbrowns at each other. On those occasions, he thinks they might have fucked something up pretty badly.

It feels like they can't ever get it right - like a bad sprain, a disjointed shoulder you keep rotating and rotating and can't snap back into place. Sometimes they're too much like they were as kids, elbowing each other and shoving and saying _retard_ and _jerk-ass_ \- and then other times their palms wind up pressed together, Sam's fingers longer and thinner than Dean's as they slip together and fold in neatly against the dips between knuckles. 

He knows, distantly, that there used to be something more than this in his life. He can remember kindergarten teachers with warm hugs, and field trips to natural history museums with his fifth grade class. There were times when he wrote essays about what he wanted to be when he grew up, and they came back with 100% at the top. He can't remember growing up, leaving those safe things behind - and maybe that's normal, but it doesn't seem fair. 

When he was a kid he learned that the world was round, was flying through space without strings attached. It had been part of a study unit on the solar system, learning more about Earth and how it related to the rest of the universe. What he remembers about it, though, is how frightening it had seemed; it struck him as terrifying, the idea that there was no real ground anywhere, no safe anchors to tether everything down. Just an endless sense of motion, objects kept afloat by their own spinning force.

*

Winter starts to melt away in Oklahoma. The wind blows hard here, clouds moving visibly across the sky and exposing patches of blue. Tornado Alley, he thinks, although he doesn't know if they call it that in the off season. 

In a diner in Winslow, they rock-paper-scissors for the last piece of cherry pie, the loser eating blueberry and grousing. Their dad reads the newspaper, makes notations in the margins.

His life hasn't been a steady misery since birth, or anything that dramatic. When he was a kid, it was easy to roll with the punches. He hadn't thought to question it, and if he noticed that his life wasn't like everyone else's, it was something Dean could brush away with simple explanations. He was a serious kid, quiet, the kind who could pick up on the fact that it wasn't his place to bounce off the walls and demand things. "You don't want to know," got him through until he was in junior high, and then he found other ways to brush away the melancholy.

For a long time, what he had going with Dean was enough. It was a secret, one that was just theirs, and that made it feel important, special. They would look at each other over scrambled eggs in the mornings and smirk, bump knees under tables and casually pull on their sleeves, letting hickeys peek out for a second from beneath collars. He loved the feeling of being chosen, the heady feeling that Dean wanted him, Dean needed him, in a way that went beyond the built-in company of family. 

For a year, maybe two, that was what got him through it all. 

Somewhere along the way it had started to go stale. At some point he realized that Dean wasn't hankering for the same things he was, that Dean was content with what they had between them. He wasn't looking for anything more than the occasional fuck with a girl here and there, just to change things up a little. He was as emotionally grounded as he was ever going to get, and Sam was hungry for something more. He is hungry, even now, for things he can't name. 

He had imagined that one day they would grow into lives of their own, they would decide things for themselves.

Now Dean sits next to their dad, skimming down obituaries and tapping a pen against the formica table. Sam watches him circle things, watches him scrub his hand over his face in a world-weary way. He wants to tell Dean that it's all pointless, that one day he's going to fall down dead in this pursuit for justice and their father will step right over him and keep going.

Instead he scrapes his fork across his plate, collecting traces of cherries, and thinks that these people, these things, are all just stories in his life. 

*

It's a rhythm he's familiar with, as simple and as weary as breathing. Where are we? Is this the south? Are we the sons of a carpenter, a salesman, a thief? Is it cold here? Will the neighbors grow suspicious? Every place is a copy of the last, every place is unfamiliar. He wakes up in a narrow bed, a room with flowered wallpaper, and he has to tick through all the last places (South Carolina, Michigan, Idaho, Vermont) before he lands on the right address, before he remembers where he is.

There are no surprises, just another apartment or crumbling little crackerbox house to decorate with whatever can be scrounged from thrift stores at the last minute: yellowed poster prints of country scenes, seascapes someone painted in a continuing education course at the local junior college. The kitchen shelves are bare at the best of times, sparse with chipped glasses, commemorative information painted on the sides - a car show in Jersey, a festival in Albuquerque. A child's cup with a clown on the side, a World's Best Grandpa mug that Dean drinks his morning coffee out of. "It's heavy," he said, testing them out under the harsh blue-white lights. "I like that."

None of it is for their benefit, it's all just in case someone might drop in. A well-meaning neighbor, a classmate, a friend. It's plain and unassuming, as simple as the names they slip into on a case.

The last time Sam ever had a girl over, she had paused in their living room, forehead wrinkling as she stared at the decorative plates on the walls. They were ugly and drab, painted with scenes of Indian squaws crushing corn and posing with what Sam could only assume were spirit animals.

"Those used to be my grandma's," she had said. "They were in the den in her house until she died and we gave everything to Goodwill." 

The apartment in Missouri is cramped and dank, with a scummy pool that's always full of kids. They don't settle so much as crash, and he doesn't know - doesn't want to know - what Dean gave up and bargained and bet to secure another semester in school for him.

He works his way through half a term's worth of make-up assignments, and Dean bags groceries at ShopCo up the street. Dean's paychecks cover the rent, and their dad disappears for weeks at a time.

It's almost like having their own place, and Sam sometimes thinks that this could be for real. Maybe this could just be their lives, the same way it's everyone else's lives - making enough to cover the apartment, renting Bruce Willis movies from Blockbuster. Being a family. He knows it can't last, but if it could, it would be enough. He just wants to be happy, and it doesn't matter by what means.

*

Friends were easier to make when he was in grade school, middle school. 

The end of the year is creeping in steadily, and no one has space at their lunch table for a new kid, not when there are summer parties to plan and futures to discuss. They've all known each other since the days when they were eating paste, and he's isolated, different.

He misses the friends from his childhood like he actually knew them - people who helped him pretend he was normal, who took it at face value that he was just like them. He wonders what they might think of him now, what they took away from those short-lived friendships. Did they guess things about him? Did they notice the holes in his clothing, the occasional bruises? It's a comfort to think they might still remember him, but he knows they probably don't. Their lives are linear, straight and simple. They might lose someone here and there, but they go on with the rest; the thirty-one other children in the class photograph grow up around them and they make new memories.

He's just something they look back on later, studying the awkward faces posed in front of blurred blue backgrounds, and wonder, who is that? Who was he?

*

Deadlines and dates were part of the application fine print he didn't read, and he loses track of the schedule of things while they're on the road. He sends a note to each school when they land in Missouri, letting them know of his address change, and then he forgets about them again. It's easy to push it all to the back of his mind, like it's just another bad experience he's trying to let go of. It's only March when he drops those in the mail, an eternity from summer, and he only realizes the days have been blurring by when talk of graduation gets louder.

Dean picks him up from school sometimes, depending on his hours that week, and one day there's a stack of thick white envelopes sitting there on the bench seat between them.

"That thing with the SATs," is what he says, staring straight ahead. "You were lying to me?"

"No," Sam says, stupidly. There's nothing to cover up anymore, but he feels cagey. He breathes out steadily, heart hammering in his chest. The envelopes are fat, heavy-looking, and his fingers itch to open them, to punch Dean.

"You're not telling Dad," Dean finally says. "You hear me? He doesn't need this shit. Not from me, and certainly not from you."

"You two always live in fucking denial." He rolls his window down. "Why should now be any different?"

*

The apartment has leaky faucets and mice. It's the kind of place where that sort of thing isn't surprising; there are ants, too, and soon the kitchen takes on the sharp, dangerous smell of Raid, which never quite clears. But the mice are loud, and that makes them more of a problem. They rattle around in the walls at all hours of the day and night, and in the mornings they find little teeth marks in the exposed cube of butter on the table.

They've lived in worse conditions, but it's unsettling. For years, he's known that scrabbling sound as one of the top signs of a haunting, and now he's woken up at four the morning by it, rustling right next to his head.

"Mice," he says one morning, collapsing at the breakfast table with his hair all messed up.

Dean shifts his gaze from the back of the Shredded Wheat box to him, and says, "Cereal," through a soggy mouthful, as though he thinks Sam may have developed that form of Alzheimer's that makes you use the wrong words.

"Mice," he says again, yanking the box from Dean's hands. "This place has mice, dude."

"Maybe they can help you sew a dress for the big dance."

It's been three weeks since the last time they screwed around, since they fought over schools. He's made a neat little chart in the back of his math spiral, where no one would think to look. Accepted: Brown, Cornell, Stanford, University of Chicago. Rejected: Yale, U Penn, Harvard. Waitlisted: Columbia, NYU.

He knows it's going to happen again, knows that they're just waiting for it. The suspense is easy, tossed back and forth between them like a ping-pong match as their dad puts together another case. They brush together in the hallway, they sit together on the couch and watch TV. He smells Dean's hair when he pads in from the green swimming pool, dripping water everywhere. He feels the flush of it like a sunburn, heating his skin inside the sleeves of his shirt and making him itch to take it off, to press against something cool.

When they're finally alone, they fuck until it doesn't feel like a thrill anymore. It feels normal, almost, like the act of doing it over and over again makes it okay. Anything for two weeks and it becomes a habit; they can easily fit two weeks' worth of touches and shudders into the time they're given. Dean thrusts between his sweat-slick thighs until he's biting down on his lip, until the sheets are totally ruined, and then they lay there together, exhausted.

"How much?" Dean says, watching Sam when he gets up for the bathroom, like he's already leaving. _Do you love me, do you need this, do I have to give?_ all hang there between them, unsaid. 

There's a strange quality about these days, as though they are suspended in time. He knows with certainty that one day he'll be looking back at them fondly, and that makes it easy to press the smaller moments into his memory, like the cast of his hand-prints in clay that got thrown out the last day of second grade.

He holds his hands up for Dean, measuring out a space.

*

He graduates third in his class. He only glances up once as he crosses, but he sees him immediately - sitting in the back row in his Metallica t-shirt, louched low in his seat, knees apart.

"Attaboy," he says when Sam finds him afterwards. The sun beats down hot on his robe, on his hair. Sam squints around at the other families, taking pictures and hugging.

"Guess I thought he'd be here," he finally says. Dean shifts and folds his arms. They don't say anything on the way back to the car.

*

Summer hits somewhere between Rockford and New Mexico, a sudden smack of heat in late May. Their dad swears he has a lead on the thing that killed Mom, and they spend two weeks chasing their tails along the Canadian border. 

When it turns out to be a black dog, he just claps them both on the shoulder. "We'll get it next time," he says. "We're gonna get that thing."

Sam jerks away abruptly. 

They head east, aimless for the first time in awhile, stopping every few hundred miles to check out newspapers and look for leads. It's a dry summer, for water and haunts. There's a drought in the high desert, and for four hundred miles of diners they have to ask for water by name. Waitresses urge them to drink 7-Up instead, or apple juice.

On back roads Sam counts bee farms; on freeways he counts memorial crosses. 

Already the enormity of wasted opportunities weighs down on him. He feels old, terrifyingly far beyond the places he should be. Eighteen doesn't seem like something he's ready for. Two years to twenty, another ten or fifty to death. Life hasn't made sense in a long time, and he keeps hoping that sooner or later it will.

These are the things he wishes he could talk to Dean about. He'd like to turn to him and ask how it's possible to feel so old and so young at the same time, to not know if you're doing the right things. Dean doesn't have any answers, though. He's four years older, but he wears them carelessly, like he still hasn't ever stopped to notice that they aren't children anymore. That he, especially, is an adult. He doesn't have the excuse of adolescence to explain away his lack of accomplishments; the meter is running on his life and he's fallen behind everyone else. By now the fresh-scrubbed students he rubbed shoulders with at all those high schools have graduated from their universities and colleges, are living lives they are happy and unhappy with. They are putting down roots, seeing the world, making families. They are doing something other than that simple, sad list of activities that has defined them since they were ten years old.

"You're such a baby," Sam says to him, and Dean punches him on the arm, not knowing what he means. Not knowing it means anything at all.

*

The streets seem to overflow with people in the summer. They're in all the diners, all the motels - newlywed couples, families, people off from school. Everyone's trying to see the world, and they smile at each other tiredly at rest stops and gas stations. Sam imagines that they're happy, although he knows that's naive. They seem happy, though; they're doing something they've planned to do, saved up for, hoped into existence. They've all chosen to be together, and that seems foreign to him in all the best ways.

In July they find a string of haunted mills in the Midwest, and then stumble across a rawhead in Louisiana. They land in Receda, Illinois for three weeks - long enough for Dad to salt and burn three bodies and Dean to get fired from a job at a coffee shop. They dig through newspaper archives, they look for discrepancies, they cross names and places off their lists.

Sam looks out the windows when they're on their way somewhere. As a kid he'd wave to other passengers, press his face against the glass and smudge it up, but now he just watches. It's easy to imagine himself into any of the nowhere towns they pass through; Samuel Winchester, just another name on a mailbox, just another face in a crowd. 

In the south they pass restaurants with the Virgin Mary painted on their sides, LOS DOS AMIGOS PARKING ONLY! stenciled under the yellow glow of her holiness. In the north they watch Mormon missionaries pound the pavement, lost looking amidst the tenement slums. 

The motels on roadsides all have grand names, names meant to lure you in. They advertise fifty miles down the road, sometimes, building up expectations slowly. Free cable, phone lines, pool. The truth of it always comes as a blow of disappointment; The Memory Lane Lodge isn't anything more than a scraggly clump of trees, blocking out the sunlight over a long, narrow series of rooms built in 1954.

*

There was a time when the library was the only place he felt at home. He'd get dropped off there sometimes, because it was safe and public, with orders to be on his best behavior and never tell anyone he was there alone. Over time the children's section gave way to the simple, austere world of fiction, and it was there he learned cut-and-dry world of Tom Clancy (Dean would like those, he decided), the lush and confusing world of Tolkien (a new appreciation of Led Zeppelin songs followed), and the warm and welcoming arms of CS Lewis. 

Reading had been another way to connect with people, to touch something they had touched, to know something they had known. The first time Dean ever stole something, it was a pack of Now 'N Laters from a little gas station mini-mart, the kind too simple and small-time for hawk-eyed employees or surveillance cameras. The first time Sam ever stole something, it was _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ , stamped three times with "Property of the Brownsville Public Library" and dog-eared by someone else on all the pages with sex.

Now he reads for distractions, more than anything. It's an excuse to pull away, to not have to answer questions. He can thumb his way through a battered paperback instead of watching Dean, pale under his freckles, elbow sunburnt from being propped in the open window. 

California's haunting him now, in long-forgotten oldies and the shadows of power lines that arc across the pavement and look like the Golden Gate Bridge.

He didn't tell Dean about Stanford, about the full ride he was awarded. He didn't explain why he chose it over Brown, which gave him the same package. Why he wanted to disappear somewhere hot and sunny, why it seemed safer than anywhere else. A tucked-away pocket, a place the Winchesters never pass through. A place without any memories for him to trip over.

Dean watches him carefully, cautiously, like he might watch a trauma victim, and Sam thinks he probably figured it out on his own. He's probably understood since that day in Missouri, when he opened their mailbox and found the stack of envelopes, heavy with course catalogues and potential futures.

He can almost see it, if he tries, the anguish and frustration that's slipping from him to Dean. It's like every time they kiss he leaves a little more of his uncertainty behind. He couldn't explain it to him even if he wanted to, because Dean thinks the fact they're family should be enough to hold them together. Dean loves him like he loves their father, and he thinks that love will be enough to save them all. That if he'd been older and able to love their mom more, maybe he could have saved her, too.

Sam watches the light reflect off of Dean's silver ring, and it's only in that moment that he notices the mirror it is of their father's wedding band. 

It's a terrifying thing, to be loved that much.

*

In late August, he wakes up from dreams that tangle around each other, dreams of faded people on rickety porches, people who play the guitar and laugh like the sound of things frying. 

When he was a kid, he would shake Dean awake after strange dreams. Dean would grumble, bat at his hands irritatedly, but then he'd pull him in against his chest and tell him to think about good things. Remember that field of flowers in Ohio? Remember when we climbed that tree? Remember the fireflies in Virginia, and you tried to catch them? Remember that ham at Pastor Jim's on Easter? Together they would unroll their history, the little bright spots, and touch them carefully, afraid to over-use them and make them lose their magic. It wasn't the memories that helped him sleep, just the ritual and the warmth of Dean's arms.

He breathes in the heavy mildew smell of the Coral Court Inn, and runs through the series of states in his mind again - Indiana, they're in Indiana. Three miles off the road, one of those little disappointing motels, rotting in the damp shade. He works his leg between Dean's, because it's after midnight and he's a heavy sleeper, and brushes his hand up over the flat planes of his back. It's more than he'd normally do with their dad in the other bed.

Tomorrow he'll say that he's leaving, and take the downpour that follows. He knows no one's going to wish him luck, pat him on the back, and he's ready for that. He's got plenty of his own remarks to make, things to say in the heat of the fights that will come.

He knows Dean will just look at him guardedly, and that something between them will shift, change. Something will pop back into place, that shoulder he's been rotating for years now. And that, more than anything, is what scares him.

*

It was second grade, he thinks, when he had that lesson about planets in space. Maybe third. Now that he thinks about it, in the dim fluorescent lighting, he can almost remember the smell of the classroom, and how the teacher still used chalk instead of dry erase marker. It had been his turn that day to take the fat erasers out onto the playground and clap them together, and he remembers how he stood there on the blacktop and thought about flying through space. For a moment, he had almost been able to feel it right under his feet - a terrible upswing, pinning him in place.

The speakers in the Greyhound station crackle and rustle, a voice telling him of a delay up the road. 

All that's left to do is wait.

 

-fin.

**Author's Note:**

> This is sort of a companion piece (but not a sequel) to another fic of mine, [Summer Blackout](http://archiveofourown.org/works/552880). Both explore Sam and Dean at age seventeen, and both are set during a time the Winchesters stopped moving long enough for them to enroll in school and glimpse normalcy. Summer Blackout skews more underage (Sam is 13, Dean is 17, no established relationship), but that aside, they're two sides of the same coin.


End file.
